Bài đọc 4
Of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, a remarkably small number dominate. According to the reference catalogue Ethnologue, more than half of the world's population speaks one of just two dozen languages as their first language. At the other extreme, thousands of languages have only a few thousand speakers, and many have far fewer. Linguists estimate that around forty percent of all languages are now endangered, meaning that children are no longer learning them, or are learning them less and less.
Languages have always risen and fallen, of course. What is new is the speed of the change. As people move to cities, as schools and the media operate in national or global languages, and as parents come to see a minority language as a barrier to their children's success, the chain of transmission from one generation to the next can break within a single lifetime. Once the last fluent speakers die, a language may survive only in recordings and written descriptions, if it was documented at all.
Why should this matter to anyone other than linguists? Advocates offer several arguments. Each language represents a distinct way of organising experience, encoding knowledge about local plants, animals, landscapes and history that may exist nowhere else. For the communities concerned, a language is often bound up with identity, and its loss can be experienced as a deep cultural wound. Some research has also suggested links between the use of indigenous languages and the well-being of young people in those communities, although such findings are difficult to interpret.
Sceptics reply that language change is a natural process and that people should be free to adopt whatever language offers them the most opportunities. There is some force in this argument; no one can be compelled to speak a language. But it overlooks the fact that the choice is rarely free. Many minority languages declined not simply because they were less useful, but because they were actively suppressed, sometimes by punishing children for speaking them at school.
Encouragingly, decline is not always irreversible. The most famous example is Hebrew, which for centuries was used mainly in religious and written contexts before being revived as an everyday spoken language in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; today it has millions of native speakers. Less dramatic but equally instructive are the "language nests" pioneered by the Māori in New Zealand in the early 1980s, in which young children are cared for entirely in the threatened language, an idea later adopted in Hawaii and elsewhere.
What these cases have in common is that revival depended less on government policy alone than on the determination of communities themselves, combined with practical support. Recording and describing endangered languages remains urgent work, but a dictionary on a library shelf is not a living language. Languages survive when people, and above all children, have reasons and opportunities to use them every day.